Shane Richmond is Head of Technology (Editorial) for Telegraph Media Group. He first joined the Telegraph in 1998 and has been Online News Editor and Communities Editor. He writes about all kinds of technology but especially Apple, iOS, ebooks and ereaders, and digital media.

If Lady Gaga has a problem with royalties, she should talk to her record label

Spotify has responded with unusual detail to claims that Lady Gaga made just £100 from a million plays on its service. The streaming music company doesn't usually get specific when talking about what it pays to artists but it's clear that they're becoming frustrated with regular criticism coming from certain parts of the industry.

For the record – pardon the pun – Spotify says the Lady Gaga figure is out of date and relates only to money paid in Sweden to the Swedish half of the duo who wrote the song Poker Face. It wasn't all of the money that Spotify paid out for playing the track and it was paid at a time when Spotify was still a very small service.

But, really, I don't see why this is Spotify's problem. Whatever money Spotify paid for the right to play Lady Gaga was negotiated with Universal, her record label. Whatever her record label decides to pass on to her depends on her contract with her lawyer.

The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (Basca) is the latest to turn on Spotify, arguing that the streaming service should be more transparent about what they pay to songwriters. That's a fair point but Spotify probably have sound commercial reasons for wanting to keep these numbers to themselves. There are lots of music industry players to who have to agree licences with Spotify and making its terms public in one area is unlikely to help it to get the best deals in another.

Speaking at South By SouthWest last month, Daniel Ek said that Spotify had to negotiate with around 5,000 US publishers as part of its bid to launch the service in the US and that's before you count record labels and other rights-holders.

However, though striking, the comparison is flawed. Comparing purchases with free streams (or even with streams by premium subscribers) does not compare like-with-like. Similarly, some of the rates are for individual tracks and other are for albums. Finally, and most critically, the chart assumes that these revenue streams are mutually exclusive – a flaw that Krzysztof Wiszniewsk, who collected much of the original data at his Cynical Musician blog, did acknowledge and attempt to account for.

The situation is far more complex than the Information is Beautiful chart suggests. That chart, at a crude reading, says 'Spotify is no good for artists' but it's entirely possible that Spotify could be very good for artists if used as part of a broader strategy. The comments under the Information is Beautiful post and on Wiszniewsk's are well worth reading if you'd like to understand the issue better.

An alternative reading of the IiB chart is that signing with a major label is no good for artists. After all, artists who press their own CDs will enjoy an 81 per cent royalty whereas, according to the chart, a "high end royalty deal" will pay an artist just 10 per cent. However, that's an over-simplification of the truth too.